(A) Brief Reading List(s)

I’d just like to say – yes, I know I’m terrible at keeping a blog. (Does one keep a blog? Does one have a blog? Does one just…blog?) I’m afraid there’s no excuse. I just don’t have any sense of self-discipline. One way I try to keep some form of structure in my life is through lists. So I’ll start here, with two that aren’t so personal that they can’t be seen. One is more specific, but both are useful…I think.

List 1

• The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
• Waking Up in Toytown (Burnside)
• The Music Room (Fiennes)
• By Midnight (Cunningham)
• Snowdrops (Miller)
• How to Read the Air (Mengestu)
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid)
• A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
• The End (Scibona)

List B

• Roberto Bolaño
• Clarice Lispector
• Franz Kafka
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Kazuo Ishiguro
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Haruki Murakami
• Albert Camus
• Umberto Eco
• Graham Greene
• Stieg Larsson
• Leo Tolstoy
• Solzhenitsyn

Apologies for any spelling mistakes; I can barely read my own handwriting these days and my attention span is so short I’m scared that if I check to see if I have the right spellings I may never come back.

As for the reading that I should be doing…

2010: How It Was

I was looking at some of my friend’s old photos online (hi, W!), and stumbled across a photo of five yellow lockers in a row. This photo probably means nothing to everyone else, and even the people who used those lockers at some point might forget they ever had. But for me, the photo is a memory, and a reminder – a memory of not having the last week of that school year because of swine flu; a reminder of what can happen in a year.

The photo was taken last year in June, and in the time between the June of 2009 and of 2010, so much happened, when I look back – it feels like it was longer than 365 days. Time and events look different, depending on whether you’re looking forward or looking back. Take a period of time in your past an example. Now that it’s passed, you know what happened and probably have a good idea of why and how it happened. You’ve learned certain things, and forgotten others. Now go back to the beginning of that chunk of time. You weren’t sure how things would turn out, you spent large amounts of time obsessing over tiny details that don’t matter now. (Or perhaps that’s just me).

In retrospect, you realise once-important things are forgotten and once-trivial details now shape your life. Does that mean your judgement was wrong? …Maybe. That’s what I’d say on an average day. But I’m going to take the more optimistic route here and say – no. It’s like this quotation (whose origin eludes me and makes the ‘don’t forget to cite your sources’ part of me very uncomfortable):

“Never regret anything because at some point it was exactly what you wanted.”

Likewise, I’d say in this situation, “never regret anything because at some point it was exactly what you thought”. Ok, that’s nowhere near catchy. And the cynical part of me would modify the original to say “it was exactly what you thought you wanted”, but that’s not the point of this post. This particular post is supposed to be all, ‘I wonder what the new year holds, I can’t wait, this is going to be the best year ever’, etc. Alright, that’s really not my style, and I couldn’t possibly say that kind of thing sincerely without at least a little alcohol in my system. But the sentiment is (mainly) real.

Ok, this is going to be a really long post – longer than usual, I mean.

2010 has been a really long year. So much happened that I’m not sure where to begin. A very basic overview:

January: IB mock exams (I thought they were bad until I took the final exams); pulled a joint semi-all-nighter (it’s actually a good memory now – can you believe it?); wrote two essays that would get me into my first (realistic) choice of university.
February: I don’t remember much happening.
March: had one of my final IB exams – German oral (it could have been better); started to panic about the rest of the final exams.
April: exam leave started at some point; computer crashed.
May: 15 IB final exams packed in the space of 8 days (not consecutive, but close); became purposeless afterwards.
June: graduated; went to Taiwan on an awesome grad trip.
July: watched Germany lose against Spain in the World Cup; moved to a house (I’m using ‘house’ generically – I actually moved from flat to flat) half the size of the one I’d been living in for the past 7 years (my whole secondary school career!); got IB results and celebrated.
August: friends started to leave for university.
September: finally updated my phone; moved house again (using ‘house’ generically again), to a completely different country in a completely different continent, and totally freaked out about it the night before I flew.
October: met a lot of people (for an unsocial, occasionally anti-social person like me, it’s pretty significant); went clubbing for the first time.
November: watch people go home for Reading Week (didn’t feel homesick yet); got a cough that lasted two weeks; won NaNoWriMo in 15 days.
December: understood what it means to be homesick (for the first time in my life, I think); turned 18.

Emotionally, geographically, mentally – it’s been a really long year. I’m repeating it not because I’ve run out of things to say, but because it’s true.

Since I don’t have any champagne, I’ll have to toast the passing of 2010 with wine. But that’s ok, because next year will be better. And I am being sincere this time.

The Obligatory Holiday Post

Alright, it’s not really obligatory – more like…ubiquitous, I guess. I mean, everyone does one of these, right? Usually expressing some sort of celebratory sentiment, well-wishing for any readers out there, etc. Boring indeed. But who am I to complain? My posts usually mention the fact that I’m procrastinating, that I have work due very soon, and that I’m bored. Check, check, and check. I’m all three right now. I’m bored of this too.

Also, I rescind the sentiment about December being my favourite month. That honour belongs to July, despite its undesirable weather. December isn’t stress-free, and I don’t think it’s actually ever been. As far back as I can remember (bearing in mind that my memory is really bad), this month has been about revision, essays, and generally unavoidable projects. Having finished secondary school, I might not have to reserve the holidays for mocks revision anymore, but there’s plenty to fill the gap.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of nice things about December. It’s just that they’re few and far in between and if I put this in utilitarian terms, there’s far more pain than pleasure. Don’t take that the wrong way either, please.

I’ll confess now – I didn’t start writing this post with any plans in mind. I don’t know where it’s going; it’s just more random rambling as usual. That shouldn’t be a surprise. I always start writing with the best intentions in mind – I’m going to be eloquent, I’m going to structure the post in a reasonable manner, I’m going to stop complaining about my work and actually do it– well, if I really thought like that, I wouldn’t be writing this. It’s circular. I don’t feel like figuring out exactly how and why, but it doesn’t matter either.

I guess I should make regular blogging one of my New Year’s Resolutions. The concept in itself isn’t bad at all, I’ve found. Occasionally I manage to stick to a few of my resolutions, so I keep making them every year in the (stupid) hope that one year I’ll stick to them all. The endeavour’s doomed from the start (because I make more resolutions every year than the year before), but it’s nice to try.

It’s a good thing to reflect on your life sometimes. For some people, once a year is about enough, but I feel like some people need to do it more often. And then other people should do it a little less. Over-thinking and over-analysing is no good either. In the end, though, it’s a personal preference, and all this is just a suggestion. Think, reflect. That sort of thing can be useful, but sometimes harmful too. Moderation is key.

At this point I’m starting to sound like a bunch of cliches piled together, so I’ll stop here. Ramblings should also be governed by the ‘moderation is key’ rule.

December

It’s one of my favourite months (if one can really have a favourite month at all…) for a number of reasons. One – my birthday’s in it. Two – the weather. Three – holidays.

Number one is a no-brainer. Number two – well, if you were as heat-phobic (is that a word?) as me, you’d understand. It started snowing here in London just yesterday – in the part where I live, anyway. It was my first time seeing snow up close. Of course I’ve seen it on mountains and such – but that’s from far, far away. Even though there wasn’t much snow, it was still quite an experience, seeing it lit by street lamps in the dark of the morning, seeing it swirling down with King’s Cross station in the background, seeing it standing out on black winter coats.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be something romantic about those images, somehow. In any case, London looks better with a white coating of the stuff.

With snow come the unavoidable thoughts of holidays. Christmas, if you celebrate it, or just a nice long break for poor students like me. Last year I was cramming for mocks at this time, but this year it’s not quite as stressful. I won’t be doing so much memorisation, for one. Instead, it’s 3 2000-word essays. It’s times like these I’m actually thankful for having done the IB. Not like there was a choice, per se, but given all the negatives, at least some good came out of it. I know how to write a decent essay, I know how to cite sources properly, I know that 2000 words isn’t impossible – as long as I have enough caffeine in me, of course.

Back to the topic of holidays. I can’t go home for the three or so weeks, which is a shame, because everyone else seems to be going home – at least, in their first year. I’ll have to live with it, I guess. One of the boxes my parents sent (back in mid-October!) finally arrived, after seven weeks of waiting, and the other box should be getting here soon, so that alleviates the homesickness…a little. I’m not a person who gets homesick a lot, but when everyone is going home and you can’t…well, how would you feel? I’ll live, I suppose.

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I finished NaNoWriMo without problems, in 15 days. But I don’t feel like I accomplished anything. Maybe because I didn’t put as much effort into making my writing decent, or maybe because half the time, I wasn’t even really aware of what I was writing…

Remember, Remember the Whole of November

November has always been a busy month for me. Well – ever since I heard of NaNoWriMo, November has become a somewhat crazy month. Maybe I should explain; that would hopefully make me look a little less insane.

NaNoWriMo, simply put, is a writing project where the objective is to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days – specifically, in November. I’m not going to go into details; I’m terrible at explaining things, so here’s the page with all the necessary information.

I started it back in Year 12, succeeded that year, failed dismally the second, and this year’s my third year. Whether I’ll get anywhere or not, no one knows – because I haven’t even started. I know, I know, it’s almost the third day (and I should be at least a tenth into my novel) and I haven’t typed a single word – unless you count ‘Chapter One’ as a legitimate part of my word count (I certainly shouldn’t).

You’re probably thinking – so what if you have 50k words to write? That’s nothing, you lazy ass. And I’d agree. If I didn’t have three optional essays to do for the modules I’m taking this term: Introduction to Political Philosophy; Knowledge and Reality; History of Philosophy I. Yeah, they’re supposedly ‘optional’, but I honestly don’t trust myself to write the proper assessed ones (set before the Christmas break, due on the first day of Term 2) without having done at least one (preferably two, or even three) of experimental ones beforehand.

Essays are, as I’ve learned from IB, an arduous endeavour. The ideal process involves heavy amounts of brainstorming, planning, researching, writing, editing, referencing…and caffeine. To be fair, the ideal process shouldn’t have to involve caffeine, but it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise.

I’m already behind on the process. And I mean the realistic process (we won’t go into details), not the ideal process. For History of Philosophy I, the titles were announced the week before last, which means I’ve basically thrown away two weeks’ time to do whatever preparation necessary. Essentially, I’m falling back into my old IB habits, yes. Can it be helped? I don’t know.

Is there any good news? I think there might be. In my head, I have this amazing scenario where I use my Philosophy courses as inspiration for my NaNoWriMo novel, and use my ongoing novel as inspiration for my Philosophy essays. Of course it works out in my head. In real life, though…just wish me luck. I have no idea what I’m doing. I think that’s obvious.

First Impressions Of London

So I’ve been here about a week, and things are (I hope) starting to look slightly more manageable. Of course, I could be completely mistaken and things are about to get a lot worse. There’s evidence for both sides of the argument, but for the sake of my sanity, I’m just going to go ahead and believe things are getting easier.

Transport’s not a problem. I walk to uni (it takes about 30 minutes and that’s my daily exercise for now), and there’s the Tube if I’m going further. So far I’ve managed to walk pretty much everywhere. Oxford Street and Chinatown are both within reasonable walking distance, since they’re not too far from my uni. Walking back, loaded with shopping, isn’t great, but it’s manageable.

My hall is pretty good too. I have a single room with an en-suite (jealous?), and my room’s definitely bigger than the space I have back in Hong Kong. I say ‘space’, because it’s not a room. But let’s not dwell on that. I share the kitchen here with 5 other girls (by luck, it’s an all-girls flat), although I don’t really bump into them much.

The uni’s great. I guess it sounds sort of shallow to say this, but I really like it for the architecture. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel more motivated to study/learn/whatever if my surroundings feel really…academic. Maybe that’s sort of vague, but what I mean is, I like the atmosphere you might get in a library, or a really old building, or something like that. I checked out the Senate House Library online while I was registering for it, and it seems ideal.

Food is slightly problematic. I only have a single pot, a plate, an oversized mug, and various cooking/eating utensils. Before you tell me to go buy more stuff, I’ll tell you that the rest of the stuff is coming in the post. It’s arriving in a month’s time, though, so what do I do till then? Please give me suggestions of single-pot recipes. Oh, and the pot doesn’t hold all that much – it’s the size of a small-medium saucepan. And to make things more difficult, fridge space is very limited, although I have plenty of freezer space, and my budget is small.

Speaking of budgets, I haven’t managed to set up a bank account yet, due to two primary reasons:

• I’m not 18 yet
• I’m not a permanent UK resident

Those two criteria are more problematic than you can imagine. Although I have enough money to sustain me for now, I need an account to:

• Pay tuition fees
• Pay accommodation fees
• Do the laundry
• Top-up my Oyster card and phone online

You know what, let’s just call it a day and say that everything’s impossible without a bank account. It’s nearly the truth. Paperwork is what makes everything really troublesome, but paperwork makes the world go round. I wonder what that says about us as humans. We like trouble? We like organising things into neat little boxes? We have to create trouble in order to avoid trouble? Really, I have no idea. All I know is that paperwork is the bane of my existence.

What else? I think that’s about it for now. London seems ok overall.

Nearly At The Beginning

It’s been a while since I last updated this. Even though I’m not a person who has a set schedule to blog, it’s nice to post something once in a while.

I’m flying to London on the 26th – just 5 days from now! It’s an early flight – I think I have to get up at…4.  I live about 1.5 hours away from the airport; I need to check in 2 hours in advance, since it’s an international flight; my parents are coming along to see me off (unnecessary in my opinion – it’s not like I’m a stranger to flying, or airports, or other countries) – so maybe I should make everyone wake up at 3 instead. Hey, look, it’s my IB exam schedule all over again – I used to wake up at 3 to cram.

Less than a week to go, but what have I done? I’ve started throwing clothes and things in my suitcases, but Sunday still feels so far away. I still spend most of my day in front of the computer, for once. Maybe it’ll hit me tomorrow, or the day after that, or on Saturday night. Maybe. It’s very difficult for my mindset to snap from one extreme of the spectrum to the other, but I guess it’ll happen eventually.

Still feeling unprepared academically, though. I’ve read half the books on the reading list, but I feel like I’ve just been turning pages. I don’t think there’s much I can do about that.

Early Morning Run

You wake up at 5:30, warm up, examine your growing eyebags in the mirror, and step out the door at 6. The locks on your door are loud at any time of day, and seem hostile in the pre-dawn stillness. There’s a man waiting for the lift on your floor. You don’t exchange ‘good morning’s.

The river smells like morning breath and last night’s rubbish, but you run anyway. No one gets up at dawn to go back to bed – well, no one you know. A glance at your watch, a mental note of the time, and off you go. There’s nothing to disturb you, except the pounding of your heart, the shortening of your breath, and the slapping of shoe soles on concrete marked with brown-black stains.

The inner curve of the river is shorter than the other, but it’s also steeper. Doubt smoulders in the back of your head, in your calves, in your thighs. Can you really do this? How long has it been since you last ran anything for more than 5 minutes? But as your legs find the half-remembered rhythm, your mind clears, and the world is blessedly quiet for a single fluid moment. It, too, passes.

The rushing of a car, the familiar sounds of a train, the comforting low hum of your world as it begins to turn. The man sitting shirtless on the ledge of the river bank seems frozen – only his eyes flicker towards each person as they go their way. Businessmen. Businesswomen. Old men and old women. The girl trapped for an instant in the magic of a blue dawn and a pair of worn-out running shoes.

Getting Nowhere

I’ve been going round in circles lately…

The height of my internet addiction always hits sometime in summer. It’s extraordinarily pathetic, but I sit at home all day in front of the computer. Time passes just like that. Every day. 7 days a week, sometimes. I don’t really know why myself – it just seems to happen. Even if I have work to do (like I did last summer, and – who am I kidding – this summer too), I’ll avoid it like the plague and keep mindlessly clicking.

It’s partly a music thing. I usually have headphones on for most of the day, and when I have that constant audio input, I tend to tune out pretty much everything. It doesn’t even matter what music it is anymore. Last night one of my friends sent me a video of a pop girl group she didn’t like – a group I would have slapped myself for listening to a year ago – but I just sat there and watched.

No reaction, no opinion, just – fact. The video played, I watched, but I don’t think I really processed any of it. This sort of thing is really common lately. I notice myself doing it all the time. I watch videos, I listen to music, I read books – but I don’t respond. Someone on a forum said something (sorry for being so vague – I can’t remember when and where and who and why) about there being a difference between reading and turning pages, and I think that describes my situation really well. The body’s engaged, but the mind’s not.

Is there a solution? Hell, I don’t know. In theory, there should be, since I find myself in one of these moods every summer, and I always manage to snap out of it eventually. Even if I end up in the same place a year later. The cycle, it repeats and repeats.

Is there a solution? I guess the obvious thing to do would be:

• Switch the computer off
• Do something purely physical (sport, or something)
• Go see friends

I had the perfect opportunity after the grad trip. Holidays really work – if you actually go on holiday, that is. Something about the change of scenery, change in language, change in currency (no pun intended) – it does wonders. And then the monotony of everyday life returns. That just reminded me of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, ‘In Your Mind‘. If it sounds familiar, it’s probably because you read it during GCSEs. Yes, a lifetime ago, it seems. I like it, even if it seems simple. Whimsical- this is not an analysis. All I actually want to say is that it feels like it might apply in a few months’ time to me.

Rambling aside, I’ll try to use tomorrow (and hopefully the days after it) productively. I should clarify – by ‘productive’, I mean pretty much everything that doesn’t involve sitting in front of the computer.

I think I wanted to say more, but I’ve lost interest already. Again.

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Now playing: VAMPS – SWEET DREAMS
via FoxyTunes

People Change…

I was importing music from various CDs onto my laptop, since the last time I did it, I had no idea what bitrates were or why they mattered. As in, I was importing at 128kbps. A travesty, isn’t it?

Anyway – I found one of my old burnt CDs, dating back to when I actually used a CD player to listen to music. No iPod back then, you see. This CD was from 2006, and these are the songs:

• Alicia Keys – Fallin’
• Alicia Keys – If I Ain’t Got You
• Avril Lavigne – Happy Ending
• Bullet For My Valentine – Tears Don’t Fall
• Evanescence – Bring Me to Life
• Green Day – Wake Me Up When September Ends
• Green Day – Boulevard of Broken Dreams
• Green Day – Jesus of Suburbia
• My Chemical Romance – Demolition Lovers
• My Chemical Romance – To The End
• Natalie Imbruglia – Torn
• Simple Plan – Me Against The World
• Taking Back Sunday – You’re So Last Summer
• The All-American Rejects – Dirty Little Secret

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Laugh, because most of that kind of music is so typically teenage mainstream (I’m guessing the equivalent now is Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, and The Jonas Brothers? I really have no idea), or cry, because my taste was so bad.

So – in four years, what has changed? Well, I have an iPod now, for one… And since I don’t burn CDs anymore, I’ll take the top 14 songs from my ‘Most Often Played’ list as a reference:

• The GazettE – Nakigahara
• The GazettE – Dim Scene
• The GazettE – Without A Trace
• L’Arc en Ciel – Daybreak’s Bell
• The GazettE – Guren
• The GazettE – Chizuru
• 2PM – Tired of Waiting
• The GazettE – Distress and Coma
• Park Hyo Shin – After Love
• L’Arc en Ciel – Seventh Heaven
• GLAY – Sorry Love
• Outsider – Alone
• Kyuhyun – 7 Years of Love
• Park Hyo Shin – Lost

Ok, that doesn’t demonstrate anything, other than that I’m a huge GazettE fan and that I’ve become a different kind of mainstream. Damn. Someone please recommend me music?

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Now playing: Angela Hewitt – Bach: Toccata In E Minor, BWV 914
via FoxyTunes